Archived autosave?

[nodots]

Instead of just exiting after an error, maybe there could be an auto save after a "block valid" check that just throws away invalid blocks but keeps the valid blocks (even in inventory)?

If my world name was "castle" then the auto save could be "castle.[dump]" or something (with an option to attempt reload from the dump). That could give me the possibility to at least get back most of the level data of what's been built - so that a 4 hour uninterrupted (read: unsaved) session isn't wasted by a crash...

stats:
build 435 (448 has OpenGL compilation errors on my machine?)
mods: Core, Dynamic Blocks
OS: Win XP
Java: Version 7 Update 13

(EDIT: I'm not referring to the save when you manually exit.)

 

[Skaldarnar]

Hey nodots,

auto saving functionality is definitely a needed feature. The idea of a dump or temp file sounds good to me. All the changes done without "saving manually" will go into the dump file, and only when exiting (to the menu) the changes would be written to the saved game.
We would need some more management stuff (like exit without saving and load from dump) as you mentioned.
Instead of copying the whole world it may be better to view the dump file as a pending changes list (that already belongs to the technical part of it ), might be that Panserbjoern has some thoughts on that (related to chunk storage/persistence?).

I experienced some of these crashes myself when building my little town, could be very frustrating to loose all what you have done by that

 

[Immortius]

Would be nice if some of these crashes were reported too.

I guess I would suggest that autosaves would go in an autosave subdirectory of the main save, and when loading it would check whether an autosave is more recent than the actual save and offer to restore from the autosave instead. An autosave would be the same as an actual save, so the complete entity and world state would be stored there.

Also could attempt to save when one of these critical errors occur before crashing, although there would be no guarantee the save would not cause the crash again on load.

 

[nodots]

Immortius, I will report the crashes as soon as I remember that the thing overwrites the log when you start a fresh instance (as opposed to append). As the log get's overwritten every time and I forget, I have yet to read what conditions caused the crash myself let alone report it.

What I said about the dump-autosave is that it might check for known/possible error conditions in the block/position data and throw away the bad data before save. I don't care if I lose a block or two, but 3/4 of a 40x70x60(HxWxD) castle is a little much.

Skaldarnar, I was just suggesting a little something to protect against losing data to crashes... But yeah, an actual timed or by-change-amount autosave would be schweet (and probably easier to do). As long as there is a menu configuration for it.

 

[Cervator]

Sorry to hear you lost that much work, would've loved to see it! Yeah auto save would be good, in the meantime it might be wise to exit to main menu occasionally to get saves that way

Maybe this is something that could come along with multiplayer, if the server needs to maintain world state better anyway to be able to host said persistent world for clients.

 

[nodots]

It was a design that was mathematically bound... It was simple enough to repeat, even if it did take another 4 hours. I am now much farther along, even have a moat!